On his book Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Author, Spy
Cover Interview of June 07, 2011
The wide angle
Edward Bancroft’s story offers new perspectives on a variety of topics: the history of espionage, French involvement in the American Revolution, the operation of the British government, and the character of persons like Franklin, Adams, and John Paul Jones.
I am not a theoretical kind of historian. I don’t have big conceptual paradigms through which I view the world. Through my career I have gravitated toward various topics that have caught my interest and used thorough research and sound analysis to reach conclusions.
When I started my career in the late 1970s, as a freshly-minted Ph.D., I specialized in the economic and financial history of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France. I wrote two books on that topic—admittedly, not of the sort to land on the New York Times bestseller list.
In the late 1980s and 1990s I switched to late eighteenth-century France and wrote two books dealing with French involvement in the American Revolution. It was while doing research on those projects that I discovered Edward Bancroft.
I began to take notes whenever I found information on him, and I tucked Edward Bancroft in the back of my mind for future reference. For six years I directed my university’s summer program in Oxford, and that experience took me into yet a different research direction. I ended up writing a book on the history of American Rhodes Scholars.
After finishing that project I longed to return to my “home” in the eighteenth century. I checked around with various historian friends and found that the intriguing story of Edward Bancroft still had not been grabbed. The rest, as they say, is history.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
Edward Bancroft’s story offers new perspectives on a variety of topics: the history of espionage, French involvement in the American Revolution, the operation of the British government, and the character of persons like Franklin, Adams, and John Paul Jones.
I am not a theoretical kind of historian. I don’t have big conceptual paradigms through which I view the world. Through my career I have gravitated toward various topics that have caught my interest and used thorough research and sound analysis to reach conclusions.
When I started my career in the late 1970s, as a freshly-minted Ph.D., I specialized in the economic and financial history of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France. I wrote two books on that topic—admittedly, not of the sort to land on the New York Times bestseller list.
In the late 1980s and 1990s I switched to late eighteenth-century France and wrote two books dealing with French involvement in the American Revolution. It was while doing research on those projects that I discovered Edward Bancroft.
I began to take notes whenever I found information on him, and I tucked Edward Bancroft in the back of my mind for future reference. For six years I directed my university’s summer program in Oxford, and that experience took me into yet a different research direction. I ended up writing a book on the history of American Rhodes Scholars.
After finishing that project I longed to return to my “home” in the eighteenth century. I checked around with various historian friends and found that the intriguing story of Edward Bancroft still had not been grabbed. The rest, as they say, is history.